Various

“ If poetry is to be judged by the extent to which it is sold, and especially in relation to the sales of prose fiction, then it must be admitted at once to be in a very sad quandary indeed. If, on the other hand, the status of poetry is to be discovered by a consideration of the degree to which it is talked about and written about, then no branch of contemporary literature would seem to be more flourishing. It is desirable to attempt to define what literary popularity is, and then to see how far the poets of to-day enjoy a share of it. ”

“ But the healthy and natural girl, apple-cheeked and merry-eyed, sweet-voiced—παρθενον αδυφονον—a girl of girls, is what charms mankind in life and literature. Her ways are like thistledown in a summer breeze; they suggest idyllic dreams and make us believe in all manner of delightful human happiness. We are all poets when she engages our imagination; we are all young when she loves us; we are all good in her presence,—holy-minded at thought of her.
Perhaps the surest sign of decadence in art is the appearance of the dame in the space naturally occupied by the lass ”

“ In other words, originality consists not in saying new things, but in saying true things. It is for this reason that the great writers have no surprises for us; they lift into the light of clear expression things that have lain silent at the bottom of our natures; things profoundly felt, but never spoken. In like manner, originality in form [172] and style is not a matter of novelty, but of deeper feeling and surer touch. A piece of work which, like a popular song, has a rhythm or manner which catches the senses, may have a lusty life, but is certain to have a brief one. ”

“ The deepest truth connected with the permanency of art is that there must be style, which does not stand for the same thing as diction, nor for the same thing as characteristic stroke, manner, or tone. Mere deftness with the brush, mere cleverness with the fiddle-bow, mere facility in the doing of word-jugglery, cannot pass into permanent art, and this is the lesson we need to-day. We take verbal style too seriously when we reckon with it as of more importance than fresh thought and enlarged ideals. It is not the art of saying nothing well that wins in the long run ”

“ Meredith’s fiction can there be found such brilliance of surface? such vividness of dramatic portrayal? Or at any rate where is vividness so reconciled with suggestiveness of interpretation? concrete beauty with abstract truth? In all his novels he sends our imaginations flashing over the surface of some portion of life; he calls up before us this portion of life in all its fine contrasts of color and form, of storm and sunshine, of mid-day and moonlight ”

“ Meredith’s style less racy, less figurative, less original? Surely, words and phrases that bear the impress of a nature like Mr. Meredith’s are better worth while than those that have become smooth and shiny with conventional use,—always providing that the metal be twenty-carats fine. The intimacy of the relation that Mr. Meredith’s style makes possible between ordinary folk and a great and original personality is something that cannot be too highly prized in these days of conventionality and democratic averages. The words of most writers now-a-days give us no clew to their individualities. ”

“ Le Gallienne is first of all a poet, and these little essays, which savor somewhat of Lamb, of Montaigne, of Lang, and of Birrell, are larded with verse of exquisite grace. He rarely ventures into the grotesque, but his fancy follows fair paths; a certain quaintness of expression and the idyllic atmosphere of the book charm one at the beginning and carry one through the nineteen ‘fancies’ that comprise the volume.”—Chicago Record. ”

“ The pendulum has swayed from Realism and struck the opposite beam. But the earth turned while we swung, and we have landed, not on Romance again, whence we had leaped to Realism, but on Perversity, whence a lucky spring may eventually set us down on something wiser and better. Yet there are books in the running brooks, and there may be sermons in even the troubled streams that water this new land of our discovery. The inner reaction in men and things which the outer anti-climax of names and words betokens is no barren waste, and yields experience a plentiful harvest. ”

“ Nature and common-sense crumble, and sincerity has long since withered away. Cabaret conversations are of the stupidity of sex, and small-talk in drawing-rooms runs on the idiocy of love. Mating is a platitude, begetting an absurdity, and motherhood has the quaintness of things obsolete. The abolition of sex is the new crusade, and the last religion is of the future, when the aristocracy of the intellect shall, Jupiter-like, eschew animality, and engender its children in a thought. ”

“ Whatever one may think of the special moral of the book, the nobly optimistic tone of the whole is inspiriting. Mr. Meredith’s vigorous optimism and his suggestion of endless vistas of social progress contrast curiously with Mr. Hardy’s harping on the age of the earth, Druidical ruins, and the irony of a cruel Nature. Mr. Meredith, like his own Weyburn, is “one of the lovers of life, beautiful to behold, when we spy into them; generally their aspect is an enlivenment, whatever may be the carving of their features,” or, we may add, the eccentricity of their style. ”

“ Nothing to write and the poorest imaginable style, is not exactly the same with plenty to write and not a sentence ill written. The art of writing nothing and writing it ill might, however, be admirable in the hands of a master. For example, there is Andrew Lang’s eulogy of H. Rider Haggard’s stories, which I might cite in any part of this essay with perfect propriety and unqualified approval, as being strictly in point. When Mr. Lang has absolutely nothing for subject he is alluringly objective and revels in good literature. He is singularly expert in writing nothing ill. ”

“ The policing of the world will grow more complete from age to age, but every man born into this established order will bring with him the perilous stuff of revolt and revolution. Without this background of tragic possibility life would lose that perpetual spell which it casts upon the artistic spirit in every generation; it would cease to be the drama to which a thousand pens have striven to give form, before which a thousand thousand spectators have sat in a silence more affecting than the most rapturous tumult of applause. ”

“ We all have our misfortunes for which we are not in the least to blame. The single woman whose bloom is gone is interesting as an embodied pathos, but not thrilling as a sweetheart; she looks dry as a heroine of romance; she spoils a love-song. No wonder that the realists cannot fit their art to girlhood while their theory of life excludes sweetness and health. ”

“ Maeterlinck’s manner is so obvious that no one can overlook or mistake it. With Shakespeare, on the other hand, there is the greatest difficulty in discovering any manner at all. At his best Shakespeare is magical; there is no getting at his way of doing things. His method is so free, so natural, so varied, and moves along such simple lines that we take it for granted, as if it were a part of the order of things. There is a kind of elemental unconsciousness in him which gives his artistic processes the apparent ease, the fulness, and range of the processes of nature. ”

“ Into the alembic were dissolved the entities of Baudelaire and Villon, floating still upon the earth.
Then the whole was set to the vibration of a new rhythm as strange and as remote from the consciousness of men as the songs of inter-lunar space, so that his utterances with the naturalness of a bird’s song or an infant’s lisp should have the accents of melody undreamed of. And this is not all—strangest and most tragically terrible in its possibilities of pain—the chrism of conscience burns his sinister brow. [28] The phantom of the immortal soul drives him into the outer darkness. ”

“ They conceive of Eyolf’s death as a judgment upon them, as a retribution for their shirking their parental duty. For the first time in their lives they stand soul to soul in all their naked paltriness. It is scarcely strange that they should shrink from each other. But a new sincerity is born of the very futility of embellishing pretences. The secret thoughts which each has had of the other, but never has dared to utter, pop forth, like toads out of their holes, and show their ugly faces. ”

“ But it is also Nature’s revenge, for she bestows not of her best on those who have spurned the boon, and her gifts are cruel to her prodigal sons. Passion is vouchsafed generously anew to some few who abjured it, but it has to pay its penalty. The actress who (not for respectability’s sake—this care is unknown in her Bohemia—but as a tribute to the new perversion) had renounced the flesh, and the poet who had made dying all the rage and relegated mere living to the lumber-room, have to screen the simplest of idyls, not from the stare of the Puritan, but from the prying of the last decadence. ”

“ Louise Labé went the common road of the irresponsible New Woman in literature, the road so very popular to-day, which is paved with erotic poetry and the fiction of free love and marital infidelity, beginning her new life by posing as a victim bound in loveless marriage-chains on the altar of monstrous social injustice. Her poetry was super-Sapphic and addressed to the other man, not her husband, a man who presumably was above the trade of a cordier, and therefore irresistible to the low-born poetess. ”

“ Too riotous imagination to-day! when we long for imagination and long in vain; when a wooden realism thrusts its angular outlines in our faces from every printed page. “To curb the use of adjectives” is another of the reviser’s duties. The meagre style too often seen of late may arise from this curbing.
The most astonishing aspect of this bureau of revision is shown in the patience with which authors endure its devastations. ”